In JVC 15.2., the three contributors to this Digital Forum discuss the exciting new opportunities for quantitative research. Richard Deswarte focuses on the holdings of the History Data Service and considers what makes a useful quantitative data source. Alexis Weedon assesses the production of resources suitable for quantitative research and the use of geographical information to argue for greater convergence between types of data. Michaela Mahlberg offers an introduction to corpus linguistics, exploring what corpus approaches can offer existing research
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Book Reviews (15.2)
Malcolm Chase on G. W. M. Reynolds: Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Politics, and the Press, edited by Anne Humpherys and Louis James (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008). To read the full review, visit http://www.informaworld.com/openurl?genre=article&issn=1355%2d5502&volume=15&issue=2&spage=299 David Richter on Rebecca Stern’s Home Economics: Domestic Fraud in Victorian England (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2008). To read the full review, visit http://www.informaworld.com/openurl?genre=article&issn=1355%2d5502&volume=15&issue=2&spage=303. Talia Schaffer on John Plotz’s Portable Property: Victorian Culture on the Move (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008). To read the full review, visit http://www.informaworld.com/openurl?genre=article&issn=1355%2d5502&volume=15&issue=2&spage=307.
Read moreNew Agenda – James Grande, ‘Nineteenth-Century London in William Godwin’s Diary’
William Godwin’s diary provides ‘a picture of London’s literary and extra-parliamentary political life’. In JVC 15.2, James Grande retraces the philosopher’s footsteps to reveal Godwin’s immersion in the material conditions and popular politics of nineteenth-century London. For this image and to read more about the diary, visit the Leverhulme-funded project, William Godwin’s Diary: Reconstructing a Social and Political Culture, 1788-1836. To read the full article, visit http://www.informaworld.com/openurl?genre=article&issn=1355%2d5502&volume=15&issue=2&spage=201.
Read moreTiffany Watt-Smith, ‘Darwin’s Flinch: Sensation Theatre and Scientific Looking in 1872’
Tiffany Watt-Smith won the Journal of Victorian Culture Graduate Prize Essay Competition, 2009. Published in JVC 15.1, her fascinating article explores the similarities between scientific observation and theatrical spectatorship, beginning with Charles Darwin’s self-conscious recollection in his Expressions of the Emotions of how he flinched before a puff-adder at the London Zoological Gardens. The author examines how Darwin’s scientific meditation on emotional gesture and expression was influenced by sensational performances in the theatre and the ways in which he encouraged
Read moreDigital Forum: Readers and Users
In the Digital Forum of JVC 15.1, James Mussell asks what happens to readers in digital environments? Do we read differently on screen from how we read a printed text and, if so, how does this effect the way we respond to and make use of material in digital archives? Shafquat Towheed considers the consequences of reading nineteenth-century texts, not in their original form, but in twenty-first century digital space. Dana Wheeles reports how NINES (Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-Century Electronic Scholarship)
Read moreBook Reviews (15.1)
Jacky Bratton on Jennifer Hall-Wit’s Fashionable Acts: Opera and Elite Culture in London, 1780-1880 (Durham, New Hampshire: University of New Hampshire Press, 2007). To read the full review, visit http://www.informaworld.com/openurl?genre=article&issn=1355%2d5502&volume=15&issue=1&spage=164. Charlotte Mitchell on Gavin Budge’s Charlotte M. Yonge: Religion, Feminism and Realism in the Victorian Novel (Oxford, Bern & Peter Lang, 2007). To read the full review, visit http://www.informaworld.com/openurl?genre=article&issn=1355%2d5502&volume=15&issue=1&spage=158. Donna Loftus on James Taylor’s Creating Capitalism. Joint-Stock Enterprise in British Politics and Culture 1800-1870 (Woodbridge, Suffolk: The Royal Historical Society
Read moreTrev Lynn Broughton, ‘The Bengal Obituary: Reading and Writing Calcutta Graves in the Mid Nineteenth Century’
The Bengal Obituary published epitaphs and obituaries to European ‘departed worth’. In JVC 15.1, Trev Broughton explores what this volume reveals about mourning, sentiment, and the relationship between India and Britain, colony and metropole. Grave at South Park Cemetery, Calcutta http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4049/4318023315_c498a3cc9e.jpg Browse the 1852 edition of The Bengal Obituary by clicking here To read the full article, visit http://www.informaworld.com/openurl?genre=article&issn=1355%2d5502&volume=15&issue=1&spage=39.
Read moreWendy Parkins, ‘Feeling at Home: Gender and Creative Agency at Red House’
In JVC 15.1, Wendy Parkins explores the relationships between men and women, friends and lovers at Red house, home of Jane and William Morris. She considers how the inhabitants expressed hospitality and affection through their use of space and objects. In their furnishings and ornamentation, Jane Morris and Georgiana Burne-Jones articulated their capacity for agency not merely as aesthetic objects but as creative subjects. Click here for further images of Red House Click here to visit Red House Click here
Read moreElaine Freedgood, ‘What Objects Know: Circulation, Omniscience and the Comedy of Dispossession in Victorian It-Narratives’
In JVC 15.1, Elaine Freedgood examines Victorian it-narratives – stories related by talking umbrellas, feathers, and dolls. What lessons did these speaking objects impart to readers, and what do these stories tell us about how Victorians imagined what it meant to be a narrator, a person, a possession and a subject? To read the full article, visit http://www.informaworld.com/openurl?genre=article&issn=1355%2d5502&volume=15&issue=1&spage=83. Click here to enjoy it as a narrative – Richard H. Horne’s Memoirs of a London Doll (1855)
Read morePerspective by Stephen Banfield, ‘What do you think of Stainer’s Crucifixion? Current Victorian musicology’
In his compelling survey of current work on musicology in JVC 15.1, Stephen Banfield considers how far scholars have challenged the popular disdain in which Victorian music held. Contempt for the period’s music, he suggests, is exemplified by the old joke about John Stainer’s cantata, The Crucifixion, first performed in 1887: ‘What do you think of Stainer’s Crucifixion?’ – ‘I think it would be a very good thing.’ If it disagrees with us, he argues, it is because we perceive
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